Not just politics

This isn’t a political disagreement. This is a realization that the people of this country are willing to stand with a man who proclaimed, “Grab [women] by the pussy,” then expanded on his comments by furthering our culture of normalized sexual assault by calling it, “just locker room talk.”

This is the understanding that the people of this country are willing to stand with a man whose vice president allocated money away from HIV prevention and toward programs that are intended to transform the sexual orientation of gay people through electrical shocks.

This is the understanding that the people of this country, that people in our own families, that my own grandmother, is willing to stand with a man whose divisive rhetoric inspired an endorsement from the KKK.

It’s not about politics; it’s about the understanding that over 59,000,000 people were willing to overlook a basic sense of decency because they care more about how they’ve been screwed over by government corruption and wage losses than human life itself.

What does a Trump Presidency mean for me?

It means as a white, cis straight man, I have an ethical responsibility, a moral responsibility, to my friends and this nation to say that private prison stocks are soaring with a Trump victory, to say that the oceans and the climate are on a trajectory toward death that Trump plans to exacerbate, to say that there will be no health care for the poor under Trump, to say that 2 million people will be ripped from their homes and families under Trump, to say that the persecution of black people and trans people has begun under Trump, and that we have to stand together to stop it.

We have to stop it. We have to recognize that millions of people have had their racist, transphobic, homophobic, and xenophobic beliefs validated by this election. We have to recognize that saying, it’s going to be fine, don’t overreact, is said from a place of privilege; that it being fine for you or me does not make it fine for everyone.